Tim Berners-Lee

Note that the battle
for the net display I put onto this page in a personal capacity,
and with apologies that it is rather Americanist -- assumes the reader
is from the USA. But the message, and the battle is important and
global, in my personal opinion.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He founded and
Directs the World Wide Consortium
(W3C) the forum for technical development of the Web. He founded the Web
Foundation whose mission is that the WWW serves Humanity, and
co-founded the Open Data Institute in London.
His research group at MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab ("CSAIL") plans to
re-decentralize the Web. Tim spends a lot of time fighting for rights such
as privacy, freedom and openness of the Web.

A graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web while
at CERN, the European Particle Physics
Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His
specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology
spread.

He is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of
Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence ( CSAIL)
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
where he also heads the Decentralized
Information Group (DIG). He is also a Professor in the Electronics
and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton,
UK.

Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable
technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the
Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World
Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts
to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

He has promoted open government data globally and is a member of the UK's
Transparency Board. He is President of London's Open
Data Institute.

In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the
recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the
Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and
Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen
Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. In 2009 he was
elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the
author of "Weaving the Web".

On March 18 2013, Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin
and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen
Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in
engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity."

If you need someone to find something for you about some arbitrary
subject (travel agents, or parakeets or whatever), don't ask me, but try
the Virtual Library for example, or your
favorite search engine.

If you want to know how to run a server, or how to edit HTML, check
the W3C web or your local bookstore. I'm sorry I can't
answer individual requests for help.

If you can't access something on www.w3.org , you find bad
links from www.w3.org pages, or errors in the hypertext please see the webmaster's documentation..

If you are doing homework or a school project on the history of the
Web then please check my Kid's questions, or
the more general Frequently Asked Questions; and
also, W3C FAQ, or my press FAQ
as almost everything I have is there or linked from this page. I am
sorry I cannot help with individual projects.

If you are a member of the press and need clarification or an
interview, please mail w3t-pr@w3.org
(and Cc me) with details.

If you have a serious comment on things I have signed, then do email me.
I am also always open to discussion with W3C Advisory Committee
representatives.

What not to email

Email is safe unless it contains programs. (Data and documents are fine,
programs are not). If you send me a program, I will not run it, as it
could damage my system and could be a virus.

Note: Documents for Microsoft word, Excel, and possibly other Office
programs tend to execute programs (scripts) in what you would expect to
be harmless documents. These can expose my machine to viruses, because
these programs do not (it seems) prevent scripts from running within a
document when it received by email. Please do not send me Microsoft
Office documents.

If you are sending text, please send it as plain text, HTML, of
necessary PDF. If you use your favorite word process, slide tool, etc,
and send it in that program's format, then you are forcing me install
proprietary software on whatever machine I read them on.

What you can email

These are all good document standards: Plain text messages, HTML
(sometimes called rich text) pages without scripts, Photos (JPEG files,
PNG, GIF and SVG), PDF, SMIL, RDF/XML, N3 and so on. All these can be
sent as messages or as attachments to messages. I can read them with a
variety of software programs, and they cannot contain viruses, unless
there is a serious bug in the code I use to read them. If you don't need
anything else, then use plain text.

These are good rules when emailing anyone.

Please use my full name in the "To" line with my email address, as this
will make your message look less like spam. This will happen automatically
if you have me in your address book. If you just type in my email address,
I probably won't see your mail.

I do a limited amount of speaking. If you have something you think I
would be interested in speaking at, for academic events email timbl+speaking@w3.org
with details of the event, projected audience size and profile, location
and date.

first, then please use email rather than phone. Please contact w3t-pr@w3.org
the general PR request line at W3C, rather than Amy
van der Hiel (my assistant) or Coralie
Mercier (Head of Communications at W3C) to set up interviews with me
or with other W3C staff.